"[A] man . . .the other day pointed out that I was never bored. I hadn’t thought of that before, but it’s true: I’m never bored. I’m appalled, horrified, angered, but never bored. The world appears to me so infinite in its variety that many lifetimes could not exhaust its interest. So long as you can still be surprised, you have something to be thankful for."
-Theodore Dalrymple

Tuesday, November 18, 2003

From the late Archbishop Robert Dwyer

November 5, 1965

“Here we are approaching the climacteric and consummation of the Second Vatican Council, and no Cardinal or Bishop has had his beard pulled in the sacred aula of St. Peter’s. This comes as a grievous disappointment to many. It was in the confident expectation that beard-pulling would be a daily distraction among the Venerable Brethren that we envisaged our stay in Rome, only to have our rebarbative imagination sadly dampened by dull reality.

“We had toyed, actually, with the notion of encouraging the growth of a patriarchal beard on our own chin, in the hope that some fellow prelate equally hirsute would challenge us to discover whose appendage possessed the stronger roots, but our glabrous cells, alas, could produce no more than a faint mockery, the merest six o’clock shadow, and we desisted with a sigh.

“If we are to believe those historians whose delight it is to serve up the more unedifying tid-bits of ecclesiastical gossip, beard-pulling was once a fairly common Conciliar practice. Hendrik Willem van Loon (has his name been revived this quarter-century?) once painted a vigorous picture of Athanasius and Arius hard at it filling Nicaea with clots of blood and tufts of beard, but it is to be feared that his fervent fancy outran his meager store of facts. Chalcedon witnessed many a sharp confrontal, and during the unhappy centuries when Rome and Constantinople were agreeing to disagree, there were several bouts of beard-pulling which made the contemporary equivalent of the Time-Newsweek reports. But when Trent rolled around the practice was already in desuetude, and only one lonely instance was somewhat doubtfully recorded of Vatican I. A pity, but so perish all our cherished customs of yesteryear.”

This is from Ecclesiastes, a book for which I have been searching for a good many years. It just came today, courtesy of “John R. Thompson, Bookseller” of West Grove, Pennsylvania. It is a selection of the writings of the late Archbishop Dwyer of Portland, Oregon. Those of us who knew the Catholic press of 40 years ago remember well the rich style, wit, and insight of Archbishop Dwyer.

Well before the council he predicted the collapse of orders of women religious. It would not be due, he said, to some conciliar machinations or psychological mumbo-jumbo but to the failure of the American episcopate to treat women religious as religious first and foremost. Instead, they were often treated primarily as cheap labor and their vocations not respected. Treated that way long enough, they would eventually act that way and search for better employment. His historical essays could be profound, such as his comparisons of Vatican I and Vatican II, or more ephemeral but very witty, such as that quoted above or his attempt to determine exactly when episcopal wigs went out of fashion. (This last was not, alas, included in this collection it appears.)

O Holy Ghost the Lord, Who on Pentecost gavest the Church the gift of tongues that Christ might be known,
loved, and served by peoples of divers nations and customs: watch over the Anglican heritage within Thy
Church, we pray Thee, that, led by Thy guidance and strengthened by Thy grace, that Use may find such favour
in Thy sight that its people may increase both in holiness and number, and so show forth Thy glory; Who livest and reignest with the Father and the Son, one God world without end. Amen.

LITURGICAL REGENERATION
One might infer from this selection of links that I believe
"Liturgical Regeneration" is going to come principally, if not
exclusively, from a restoration of the traditional Roman Rite.
Such an inference would be largely correct. However, see also
the Anglican Ordinariate links above.

E-Mail:
High praise, recipes, & sources for
good reeds may be addressed to:

thesixbells AT verizon DOT net

(after, of course, you close up the
spaces, change the "AT" to an "@" and
the "DOT" to a "." Spambots delendi sunt.)
(If this looks new to you, you are quite right; the
old Tavernkeeper address is no more.)

An address for complaints may possibly
be added at some point. In the fullness of time.
Le cunamh Dé. Deo volente.

Should you, in fact, decide to drop me a note,
it is entirely possible that I may decide to publish
it unless you tell me not to. And even if you tell
me not to, things do get in something of a muddle here;
in a fit of absentmindedness, I might publish it anyway.
So discretion is always advisable.

"Two of the pubs near Oxford which C.S. Lewis frequented were The Trout and The Six Bells.
Some of Lewis's American readers had written him to inquire about his views on drinking
alcoholic beverages. His response to them was in no uncertain terms: 'I have always
in my books been concerned simply to put forward mere Christianity, and am no
guide on these (most regrettable) interdenominational questions. I do however
most strongly object to the tyrannic and unscriptural insolence of anything that calls
itself a Church and makes teetotalism a condition of membership. Apart from the more
serious objection (that Our Lord Himself turned water into wine and made wine the medium
of the only rite He imposed on all His followers), it is so provincial (what I believe
you people call small town). Don't they realize that Christianity arose in the
Mediterranean world where, then as now, wine was as much a part of the normal diet as bread?" C. S. Lewis: Images of His World by Douglas Gilbert & Clyde S. Kilby